A raw and ironic analysis of the tax burden in Italy. From the story of an entrepreneur to the luxury of owning a pet: why today we live “Taxatively Dreamless.”
In Italy, the American Dream has been replaced by the “End-of-the-Month Miracle.” There was a time when we dreamed of becoming astronauts, poets, or captains of industry. Today, the average citizen’s highest aspiration is managing to pay for their car service without having to sell a kidney on the black market or, worse, asking their mother-in-law for a loan.
We are a nation of saints, poets, navigators, and, above all, desperate taxpayers. We live in a system where “normalcy” has become a luxury good—a privilege for the lucky few who inherited an empire or found Aladdin’s lamp at a flea market. Everything else is just creative survival.
Have you ever tried to explain to a Golden Retriever that his kibble costs more than Beluga caviar because of inflation and a tax burden that “suffocating” doesn’t even begin to describe? In Italy, owning a pet is no longer an act of affection; it’s an unofficial tax return. Between the VAT on veterinary services (because curing a dog is evidently a vice, like collecting yachts) and the cost of food, Fido has become a budget line item that would make a Goldman Sachs auditor tremble.
But it’s not just the animals. It’s “normal” life that has evaporated. Going out for dinner? An event to be planned with the same meticulousness as the Normandy landings. Buying a book? An ethical choice between culture and the electricity bill. In this scenario, the term “taxatively” (tassativamente) stops being a precise adverb and becomes a death sentence for every desire that rises above the threshold of mere subsistence.
To understand how bad things really are, we need to look inside a random office in a random Italian city.
Meet Elena, an entrepreneur who committed the crime of wanting to do business in Italy. Elena spends 80% of her time not innovating, but filling out tax forms, consulting accountants who look like occult priests, and trying to understand why, for every euro she pays her employees, she has to give another (and a half) to a minority shareholder who never works: the State.
On the other side of the desk is Marco. Marco is 35 years old, and today he’s celebrating his first “real” contract. It’s a monumental event. Marco spent 10 years in university, accumulating degrees, masters, and PhDs with the dedication of a Tibetan monk. Then he gave away another 5 years of his youth to various professional firms in the form of “trainee internships”—a modern euphemism for legalized slavery reimbursed with pats on the back and mediocre coffee.
Finally, Elena hires him. But there’s a problem.
Elena wants to give Marco a salary that allows him to move out of his parents’ house, buy a car that doesn’t lose parts on the highway, and maybe invite a girl to dinner without breaking into a cold sweat when the bill arrives. But when Elena looks at Marco’s total corporate cost, she turns pale.
“Marco, I’m paying 3,500 euros a month for you,” she says with a shaky voice. “But only 1,600 shows up in my bank account,” he replies, looking at his payslip as if it were a grim medical report.
The difference? The fiscal monster ate it. The State has decided that Marco’s work is a crime to be punished with an immediate financial penalty. Elena isn’t evil; she’s just being bled dry. Marco isn’t a failure; he’s just an involuntary financial blood donor. In this theater of the absurd, the only one laughing is the taxman, who collects his legal “protection money” without having lifted a finger for Marco’s education or to help Elena’s business.
While Elena and Marco try to figure out how to make ends meet, outside the office, reality bites even harder.
Let’s talk about the corporate tax burden, which in Italy hovers around percentages that border on medieval usury. We won’t get too technical—because Italian fiscal mathematics is specifically designed to induce assisted suicide—but it’s enough to know that between various regional and national taxes, a company works for the State until mid-year. From July onwards, if there’s anything left, it’s for the entrepreneur. It’s like running a marathon with a backpack full of rocks while someone sprays sparkling water in your eyes.
And then there are the excises. Gasoline in Italy isn’t fuel; it’s a tax distillate with a splash of hydrocarbons. Every time we fill up, we’re financing wars from the last century, political subsidies, and the maintenance of roads that still look like lunar craters.
But the masterstroke, the masterpiece of bureaucratic sadism, is the VAT on feminine hygiene products. For years, they were taxed as a luxury good. Because, as we know, for the Italian State, having a period is a lifestyle choice—an aesthetic whim comparable to buying a gold watch or a Ferrari. It’s a painful grip for women, in every sense: biological, economic, and moral. A tax on biology that proves just how disconnected lawmakers are from the daily reality of those who endure them.
If we were a serious country, the solution would be as simple as it is brutal. Flat Tax at 10% for everyone. Individuals, companies, freelancers, street vendors. A round, honest, sustainable figure. A pact between State and citizen: “I ask for little, you give me everything.”
But beware: freedom has a price. If we lower taxes to 10%, we must become “taxatively” ruthless with those who don’t pay. We don’t need prison (which costs the State, and therefore us, money). We need social death.
If you evade taxes at a 10% rate, you aren’t “clever”; you are a parasite stealing everyone else’s air. The punishment? Simple: you can no longer open a business, you can no longer have a VAT number, you can’t even run a lemonade stand. You become an economic ghost. No more access to credit, no more public contracts, no more entrepreneurial dignity. If you don’t contribute when the weight is light, you don’t deserve a seat at the table.
It would be a clean, fast, efficient system. But this is Italy, and simple things scare us as much as a tax audit on a Monday morning.
Here we come to the “missing” solution. Why isn’t it done? Why do we continue to live in this labyrinth of brackets and deductions that serve only to drive tax consultants insane?
Are we truly sure our politicians, with their plastered-on smiles, and the officials with their bulletproof privileges, are working for us? Or are they just fighting a war of position?
The feeling is that power in Italy has become an end in itself. Politics is no longer the art of solving problems, but the art of occupying seats to guarantee a future for loved ones, assistants, and major donors. Taxes don’t serve to improve services (which are indeed falling apart), but to maintain the scaffolding of a bureaucratic castle that serves only those who live inside it.
Every time we hear about “tax reform,” we already know how it will end: they will take two euros out of one pocket to put five in the other, calling it “efficiency.” It’s a shell game where the house always wins and the player (us) always ends up in their underwear.
In conclusion, we have reached a point of no return. In Italy, it is still possible to live, technically speaking. We can breathe, we can eat carbohydrates (as long as the VAT on flour holds), and we can complain at the bar.
But we can no longer dream.
Dreaming requires mental space, it requires security, it requires the certainty that if you work hard, if you study for 10 years and give it your all, you can build something of your own. Instead, we are trapped in a perennial present where every ounce of energy is absorbed by the struggle against bureaucracy and forced extraction.
Our life has become an exercise in subtraction. We remove travel, we remove children (who cost as much as a fleet of fighter jets), we remove peace of mind. The final play on words is as bitter as a coffee spiked with arsenic: in this country, we are Taxatively Dreamless.
Because taxes don’t just empty the wallet; they have begun to empty the soul. And a people who cannot dream is a people who has already stopped fighting, resigned to watching the sunset of their own future from behind the bars of a prison made of payment slips.
Good luck, Italy. You’re going to need it. Taxatively.
